bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

AMERICAN moviegoers have never seen action like it before.

While Hollywood favours the dull car chases and mundane martial arts of Mel Gibson or Jean-Claude Van Damme, Hongkong movie-makers produce unadulterated action - blood and guts.

And with it all on view in a recent Hongkong film festival, Tinseltown is reeling.

''This was the first time that a sampling of commercially successful Chinese language films had ever been offered to a primarily Anglo-audience in Los Angeles,'' said Mr Perry Glorioso of Landmark Theatres, which staged the event that grossed more than US$32 million (almost HK$250 million).

The two-week festival that Los Angeles Daily News film critic Bob Strauss called a ''sampling of Hongkong's finest and nuttiest offerings'' was ''phenomenally successful'', according to Mr Glorioso.

Among the films shown were Cory Yuen and David Lai's avant-garde Saviour of the Soul, which starred Aaron Kwok, Andy Lau and Anita Mui, and God of Gamblers, which also starred Lau with Chow Yun-fatt.

Other films in the series starred Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Jet Li, Brigitte Lim and Samo Hung.

Directors featured included Ching Tiu-Sing, Tsui Hark, Stanley Kwan, Jackie Chan and John Woo, who made a rare personal appearance to support the festival.

Mr Glorioso said it was Woo's cult popularity that began to make the US aware of the Hongkong film industry.

''He has quite an underground following thanks to The Killer. He has become a cult figure which is making moviegoers aware that there is a Hongkong film industry and we decided to develop this up-and-coming interest into a film festival,'' he said.

''Jackie Chan was without doubt the hero of the festival. His stunts were so amazing that at one point we had the audience clapping and cheering with excitement.'' Strauss praised the territory's action-packed output.

''It was an opportunity to thrill to the Chinese Chow Yun-fatt, and his incredible ability to fire two guns at once, while cradling a newborn baby, in the subtly titled cop thriller Hard-Boiled. Or to gasp at Jackie Chan's incredible capacity to make Buster Keaton look a statue, as he dangles from a helicopter flying through urban concrete canyons in the comic caper Super Cop: Police Story III, '' he said.

''And where else can a demon with a mile-long tongue be fought for the hand of a long-dead beauty but in A Chinese Ghost Story? ''The pleasure of Hongkong movies are infinite. Besides the territory's prodigious output of escapist entertainment, a nascent art cinema is producing some highly sophisticated work.'' Among other films shown were Armour of God II, Project A - Part II, A Better Tomorrow, Actress, Painted Faces, Peking Opera Blues, Swordsman II, Once Upon a Time in China II and Twin Bracelets.

More than 5,000 attended the event, with many of the 14 films shown playing to near-capacity audiences.

Landmark's Mr Gary Meyer, who programmed the series, said approximately 80 per cent of the audience was non-Asian. ''People were bringing their friends to introduce them to the exhilarating Hongkong-style of movie making.'' The festival was so successful Landmark intends to expand it and stage the event in other West Coast cities. But its appeal was not always certain.

At the start of the festival, Strauss asked in his column: ''Can American audiences, notorious for their disdain of sub-titled films (and the translations on Hongkong movies are often funnier than their broad moments of intended comic relief) be enticed into trying these exotic and satisfying treats?'' Ms Roberta Chow, publicity director for RIM films, which supplied the series, never doubted it.

''In the beginning, action is these films' major selling point,'' she said.

''There were lots of prejudices to overcome but I always believed that if we could get people into the cinema, we wouldn't have a problem keeping them as the audience.''   Mr Michael Schlesinger, manager of Paramount Pictures Repertory division, which handles older films, thought the films appealed because, despite the violence, they had a sense of fun and innocence not found in Hollywood.

   ''They fall into the limbo area between art house audiences who don't want to see anything entertaining and mainstream audiences who don't want to read sub-titles,'' he said.



Hongkong goes to Hollywood